Case Study: Northern Health improves patient access to emergency care with Amazon Web Services

Northern Health Improves Patient Access to Emergency Care with Virtual Emergency Department on AWS

Northern Health, which operates Melbourne’s busiest emergency department, was struggling with overcrowding, long wait times, and staff burnout as demand for emergency care outpaced capacity. The hospital also needed a faster, multilingual way to register and track patients for its Victorian Virtual Emergency Department, so patients could receive non-critical care remotely through a digital front door built on Amazon Web Services.

Northern Health worked with Amazon Web Services Partner The Clinician to deploy ZEDOC on AWS, using services such as AWS Lambda, Amazon EKS, and Amazon S3 to secure and scale virtual patient intake, clinical tracking, and video-based triage. The solution went live in eight weeks and now supports 22 languages, enabling Northern Health to serve more than 300 patients per day versus 50 before, with around 73,000 patients using the service. Wait times for virtual care dropped to 30–45 minutes from about four hours in the physical ED, and ambulance transports to the hospital fell by 10%.

Northern Health

Loren Sher

Program Director of the Virtual Emergency Department